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Candy Crush Saga is the top iPhone game in Japan thanks to TV commercial

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The undisputed king of puzzle games here in Japan is, of course, Puzzle & Dragons. Hitting the Apple App Store back in February of 2012, it has gone on to become Japan’s most popular and profitable mobile game [1]. But a new global challenger has just thrown its hat in the ring. That company is King.com Ltd, and the game is – of course – Candy Crush Saga. Currently Candy Crush Saga is the number one overall app on the Japanese App Store, thanks to a new TV commercial promoting the game in the country. It’s really interesting to see a foreign game dive into the Japanese market so emphatically like this. Serkan Toto notes over on his blog that King is the first foreign mobile game maker to do so. Recently we have seen games like Supercell’s Clash of Clans and Hay Day enter the market with some success, but that came via a different approach, tying up with Puzzle & Dragons on a cross promotion. Incidentally, heavy rotation on TV commercials really helped P&D achieve the success that it did here in Japan. Other titles have gone on to do the same, including Colopl’s hit Quiz RPG a…

candy-crush-wide

The undisputed king of puzzle games here in Japan is, of course, Puzzle & Dragons. Hitting the Apple App Store back in February of 2012, it has gone on to become Japan’s most popular and profitable mobile game [1]. But a new global challenger has just thrown its hat in the ring. That company is King.com Ltd, and the game is – of course – Candy Crush Saga.

Currently Candy Crush Saga is the number one overall app on the Japanese App Store, thanks to a new TV commercial promoting the game in the country. It’s really interesting to see a foreign game dive into the Japanese market so emphatically like this. Serkan Toto notes over on his blog that King is the first foreign mobile game maker to do so. Recently we have seen games like Supercell’s Clash of Clans and Hay Day enter the market with some success, but that came via a different approach, tying up with Puzzle & Dragons on a cross promotion.

Incidentally, heavy rotation on TV commercials really helped P&D achieve the success that it did here in Japan. Other titles have gone on to do the same, including Colopl’s hit Quiz RPG a few months back.

If you’d like to check out the Japanese commercial for Candy Crush, you can view it below. And if you haven’t tried the game yet, you can download it for free over on the App Store or on Google Play.


  1. I’m personally a huge fan of *P&D, as I’ve previously explained.  ↩